@gamester 17
you have pretty much the same idea as i do. earlier this morning we setup a svn for the project thanks to jslawler and cruent. for now, we just added a button next to my files to access the tv guide, but hope this will spawn an entire my tv section in xbmc. the current layout doesn't really work at this point, but it loads up and you are able to retrieve channel data from listings.xml in root.
i began working on a mock-up of my own, i noticed most of the grabbers issue information related to each individual program like you said, distinguishing between tv content and movie content. one thing i noticed is that it actually goes a step further than that in most cases, also issuing information as to the genre of the program (eg. sitcom, comedy, etc.) my plan is to have two windows, a window on the top 15% of the screen and a window on the bottom 85% of the screen. the window on the top would have a header to display the following information, channel number, channel name, program name, time of program, and current time. below the header it would display the genre information and a description of the program since i have not found a grabber yet that doesn't supply a short description. the window on the bottom of the screen would display the actual guide information exactly the way you laid out in your mock-up. i would like to plan this to be used as an overlay so it will be ready when interfacing with a backend program like mediaportal is possible. that way if you are watching a program already, you would be able to call up the tv guide from either a button mapped to it or from an osd, as well as from wherever else you may want to make it accessible in the gui and work nicely. i will finish my mock-up later tonight when i get back home and post it here. bear in mind, it is somewhat generic since i am using the dialog-popup.png as windows, but it accurately displays what i have in mind.
the main focus right now is to get the gui to grab and display the information within the xml properly. from there, i think we will most into a better gui layout and config screen so it will grab channel data for more people and make it as simple as possible to use. it would be great if you could drop by the irc channel a bit to help manage the project and give your insight. any dev's interested in seeing where this project goes and how everything plays out, please join us in irc on efnet #xbmctvguide
@affini
what you are thinking about the grabbers is exactly what i hope can be achieved. the way i see it, we could have a settings screen to tv grabber and have options like:
country
-after country is selected, could narrow down by states or region information depending on how the sources for the grabbers in your country work.
data source
-now that we have your country information, we can give options for data sources available in your country. since some of the data sources require you to register and have a username/password, we could display a popup dialog if the source you will be directed to requires this so there is no question about which site they should be using. at this time, username/password fields would become active if the information is required.
time
-manually set timezone
-get timezone information from time server if you use that option
service provider
-after the previous information is entered, we would be able to narrow down service providers.
lineup
-finally, we could narrow you down to just a few lineups so you would be able to select the one you need.
frequency
-this would allow the user to configure how many days of information to grab so the grabber will be able to check to see if it is up-to-date and if it is not, will be able to update itself automagically without user intervention.
save and apply
this will take some research to figure everything out, but with a proper outline of the sites, should relieve much of the pain sorting everything out. i think we should start by analyzing the main grabbers used by xmltv to start gathering information. if anyone can help with this, please get in contact with me or post your findings. also note that i am not sure that this is entirely possible with the current xbmc gui, someone more knowledgable should make revisions to this plan and give their own ideas so we can come up with something user-friendly, efficient, and feasible.
regards,
los93sol
edit: alright, i just finished the mock-up...slacked off on it, but you get the idea. sorry for my shotty photoshop skills, and the genericness of the mock-up, but it shows you what i am thinking. if anyone would like to take this and put together a better mock-up, please do.
2nd edit: i haven't included everything in the mock-up, other features would be very nice as well such as a search button that would pull up another screen similar to the search screen used by gbpvr, and the ability to jump to a specific date and time would also be nice. if gamester17 is correct with his ideas on interfacing the tv guide with tv.com and imdb.com, those lookups could be added to the context menu. we could go as far as to have different views that would change the way channels are arranged such as genres, normal, etc. we could even add an option in the context menu to add a channel to your favorites so you could have a favorites view. just some ideas that have already been discussed, but if we can get a good enough layout, it is possible to use several different options with this. hopefully this has some people interested and thinking about it. remember, if somebody can put together some better mock-ups, please do, it would be great to see what you can come up with. :lol:
3rd edit: the svn is now up and ready for anonymous checkout if anyone wants to check out what is done so far. don't expect much at this point. as of now, the code mynci left us with is running and synced to xbmc cvs as of 6-20-05. it sort of works, but needs some lovin.
instructions:
to use the svn go to
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/download.html and download tortoisesvn and install it. after that make a new directory for the source, right click it, click svn checkout, it will ask you the url of the repository, put
https://opensvn.csie.org/xbmctvguide